


beyond the peach grove

by renquise



Category: VIXX
Genre: Gen, Hints of OT6 - Freeform, Moon vampire AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-17
Updated: 2017-05-17
Packaged: 2018-11-01 20:09:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10929168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renquise/pseuds/renquise
Summary: The landing wasn’t gentle. Sanghyuk dug his hands into the ground and lifted himself up, feeling his body frantically knitting his skin back together. He stumbled to his feet, feeling too light, his toes digging in as he tried to stand up, only to tip over again, his mouth full of soft, choking moon dust.





	beyond the peach grove

**Author's Note:**

> So I was like, haha, what if Do Won Kyung is the continuation of On and On where the vampires settle down on the moon? Haha! Oh wait I guess I’m writing it whoops. Please indulge me and roll with this weird moon-vampire thing. \o/

Sanghyuk still didn’t know if they had been meant to survive. If it had been an extravagant method of disposing of a risky government project that had lingered unwanted and forgotten in the bowels of a facility.

At first, their creators had found the time to raise the six of them, gently eased them into the idea that they were dead things, modified and brought back to life, taught them a little of how they had been made, genes drawn apart and knitted back together. 

But things changed, especially when you lived as long as they did. Too soon, they were pretty, resilient, deadly things kept in a drawer until they were called upon to hurt something. Sanghyuk didn’t remember much of the in-betweens. Only knew that years upon years passed, and that the in-betweens only seemed to grow longer.

Light. Pulled, disoriented and hungry, from slumber in storage, and then blinded again, pushed into a hard metal shell. He pounded against its walls until his fists ached, called for Hakyeon, for Wonshik, for Taekwoon, for Jaehwan, for Hongbin, and couldn’t hear anything.

Deafening noise, shaking, and pressure, and pressure, and pressure, crushing him until he felt his skull might split, until--it lifted, and his limbs felt too light. A line of fading blue outside the viewport, giving way to black.

And then the moon. 

The landing wasn’t gentle. Sanghyuk dug his hands into the ground and lifted himself up, feeling his body frantically knitting his skin back together. He stumbled to his feet, feeling too light, his toes digging in as he tried to stand up, only to tip over again, his mouth full of soft, choking moon dust.

He looked up, and there was nothing above him but darkness. Darkness and specks of light. His chest felt too tight. He knew he could survive things that would kill any human. But maybe not this emptiness pressing in on every side.

Hakyeon stumbled over to him, dragging a leg bent at a funny angle. Sanghyuk caught him in his arms, and he sagged in relief, his weight in Sanghyuk’s arms oddly light. Sanghyuk held him close, close enough to crush the breath out of him if they didn’t need to breathe, and tried not to think of the emptiness of space all around them. 

—

A single artificial blood synthesizer: enough to keep one of them sated. At the time, Sanghyuk didn’t know if finding it hidden on board of Jaehwan’s vessel was a mercy or a punishment, if one of their caretakers had felt a sting of guilt when they had sent them to this lifeless place. 

Sanghyuk didn’t like to think of the first lean months spent hiding from the long lunar day in the ruins of an abandoned moon colony, carefully nursing the synthesizer, fearing that one day it would break down, and they would be left with nothing but choking dust.

Each of them faded to grey, only gaining back a pale flush when it was their turn to drink the slow supply of the synthesizer. It didn’t do any good to offer up their wrists to each other, but they couldn’t help it sometimes, needed the illusion of having fed. Sanghyuk knew Hakyeon couldn’t bear to see him skinny and grey, his fangs poking out helplessly from under his lips. Hakyeon would bite into his wrist, blood sluggishly coming to the surface, and offer it to him before it froze in the lunar night. Just a mouthful, enough for Sanghyuk to feel a little more awake, but also for Hakyeon’s hair to lose its dull shine and muted colour, fading back to grey. They fought a lot, would probably have fought more if they weren’t so tired, so tired all the time.

“Why do we want to survive so badly,” Jaehwan mused, pouting his lips out and sweeping up moon dust into a peak. 

Sanghyuk jerked his head up. 

”Nah, don't worry, I’m fine. I’m not gonna go and run into the sunny bits. But I mean. It’s a lot of trouble, right?”

Sanghyuk laughed and made a little moat around Jaehwan’s peak, then some more peaks. They almost had an entire city by the time Hongbin wandered over to flop down beside them, dragging his toes through the dust to make overlapping paths and roads.

—

If there was one thing they had, it was time. 

Time enough to settle into the moon colony, carving out a space of their own in its ruins. Time enough to engineer another synthesizer from parts of their ships and the colony, Wonshik spending long nights hunched over old, disparate parts and carefully piecing them together, trying to duplicate the design without endangering their one food source. And then another. 

And eventually, Sanghyuk could wake up in the deep, cold dark of lunar night and not feel hungry. Taekwoon’s cheeks weren’t full like they were long ago, but they weren’t sunken, either. The tips of Jaehwan’s ears had a pink flush, and Wonshik kept reaching over helplessly to touch them. Hakyeon’s hair slowly lost its grey dullness, enough to reflect the dim starlight. 

For so long, they had slept separately, shut dreamless in their drawers, starved for touch. It still seemed a luxury to slip into sleep side by side during the long lunar day, safe in the parts of the base they had renovated. To wake up with Wonshik sprawled against him and wriggle out of Hakyeon’s octopus grip when twilight came. Sometimes, Sanghyuk would wake before everyone, still dazed with the remains of the long moon day. He would lie there, feeling the close press of limbs on either side of him.

Hongbin was an early riser, too. Sanghyuk would sometimes crawl over to him as the darkness slowly grew, nudging his nose into his neck so that Hongbin would tilt his jaw up with a sigh, his mouth opening with a silent gasp when Sanghyuk pressed his fangs in. They tried not to be too loud, but Wonshik would sometimes stir beside them, rolling over to lap at Hongbin's neck at Sanghyuk's urging, sleepy and pliant. It was usually inevitable that Hakeyon would mumble something about all of them moving too much and leaving him out, quieting with a content sigh when Wonshik rolled over to offer up his wrist.

Close to each other as the sunlight faded, leaving a place that could be their own.

—

Their clothes had long gone ragged, mended and mended over again. They didn’t feel the cold, sure, but Hakyeon said that having clothes was a matter of principle. Their laboratory in the moon base had grown, and one day, Wonshik turned from their banks of synthesizers, thoughtfully saying that there were other proteins they could make, maybe.

Later, Sanghyuk’s hands shook when he lifted a single silk strand from the synthesizer, barely longer than his pinkie, slender and strong. Wonshik laughed, amazed and incredulous, when they later made red thread so bright it could be seen in the night. 

Once they had enough to weave it, Hakyeon swept it over his shoulders, turning and turning for the pure joy of the movement, a long tail of red streaming behind him against the grey of the moon and the black of the sky. Wonshik dressed himself in long, draping purple, the hems perpetually dusty when he swept in from outside, Hongbin chiding him for dragging in dirt. Everything had been grey for so long, and now, they ached fiercely for colour.

Hakyeon draped swathes of the fabric they made around their part of the base, softening its cold, white angles. A spill of gold over banks of broken servers. A trail of deep blue along an empty corridor. Sanghyuk and Jaehwan sometimes re-arranged them a little, just to see if he would notice. (He did.)

—

When they had been very young, Sanghyuk remembered Hakyeon excitedly gathering them around a book of fairy tales, about a fisherman finding an impossible, isolated place. Peach trees and fields and bamboo groves.

“Do you remember deer?” Sanghyuk said to Taekwoon. “There was one in that book, wasn’t there.”

Taekwoon crouched down and smoothed out the lunar dust, his long fingers tracing through it.

“Hyung. That deer has at least two legs too many.” 

Taekwoon huffed, tipping his head to look at his drawing. “It looks fine.”

“Is that a lizard? Wait. No. A millipede?” Hongbin said, peeking over his shoulder. “Give me a second, I’ll get it eventually.”

Taekwoon reached out to cuff them both. But Sanghyuk kept thinking of that lopsided deer traced in the moon dust.

Hakyeon pressed his lips together when Sanghyuk had suggested it, reluctant, somehow. But he was as hungry as any of them for more life in this barren place. 

Sanghyuk took cells from each of them, extracted the cell bank of the colony that held forgotten remains of Earth, and gently knit them together. He wasn’t sure how they started growing, only that they did. 

—

Years. But as always, they had time. 

Years, and then, one night, Sanghyuk lifted out a little creature from its tank: shaky, spindly legs, flicking ears, large liquid eyes. The hint of elongated canines in its little mouth. Hongbin’s eyes were wide as Sanghyuk settled the fawn in his lap, his hand trembling when he bottle-fed it the same synthesized blood as them. Taekwoon’s mouth was open and awed, and he clutched his hands to himself as if he were afraid to touch it. 

When it was strong enough, it sprang across the moon in high, wide leaps, leaving prints behind.

—

After that came flowers, and trees, and flightless birds. All resilient and strange as them, here in this precarious, dead place.

Hakyeon made careful schedules to care for what they had made. Wonshik very reluctantly accepted Sanghyuk's new finely-engineered iridescent beetles. Taekwoon made more shy, sweet animals that sometimes had more legs than necessary. Jaehwan and Hongbin coaxed blossoms from their buds, making daring excursions out in shielded suits to see them open to the sun.

The moon was dead, and so were they, and so was everything they made, perhaps. But somehow, still: alive, flushed with something like life. 

Sanghyuk dug his toes into the moon dust, smooth and grey against his pink toes, and lifted his eyes to the sky.


End file.
